Just One Word

by Melanie Jacobson

“When a story sells millions of copies, it’s because the author has found a way to connect to something important in a huge cross-section of readers.

Suddenly she wanted to withdraw her hand from his, bury both of her hands in her lap, and then curl in a little. Become a smaller target. It was her usual reaction to feeling exposed, and the way she wished she could spend every author event: in the fetal position without making any eye contact with the audience. That was the behavior of a crazy person, but she did start to draw her hand away to push her hair back, an excuse to become self-contained again. Aidan tightened his fingers around hers just for a second, and she knew it was a request to stay, not a demand. So she left her hand in his.

She waited for a sense of accomplishment to wash over her, but instead she had a feeling that reminded her of the time her grandmother had given Emma her one and only chocolate Easter bunny—Arianna Lindsor didn’t believe in commercial holidays—and Emma had bitten into it expecting a rich, chocolate treat and been startled that it was hollow inside.

You always talk in terms of taking them apart, trying to figure out their place among the greats, holding them up to the dead classics that formed your tastes, trying to see where they fit. When was the last time you read a story purely for the pleasure of it?”

it’s like someone telling a child not to dance because there are chores to do. There’s room for both things.”

There was a poem one of her college professors used to quote from Emily Dickinson about telling the truth but telling it slant. Her mother told a slant and called it the truth. But fiction could be true in its feelings, in its themes, in its relatability. And the books that people related to were the ones they crowded around here, books that guaranteed a happy ending so long as the reader was ready to stick it out through all the obstacles the characters faced to earn that ending. Earned endings. That was it. That was what she had loved about reading when she was younger. For so long now, her reading had been all about who created the most morally ambiguous, emotionally complex characters and dilemmas. They were rarely stories about people getting the good things they deserved, only the bad ones.